Using Jazz to Teach Children Literacy, Math, History, and More

Excerpted from Jazzy Fairy Tales, A Resource Guide for Introducing Jazz Music to Young Children

By Susan Milligan and Louise Rogers

Jazz is a play-centered approach to music, and we know that young children learn best by playing. Jazz is improvisational, fun, and playful. Jazz is creative and social. Jazz is easily accessible to both teachers and children. You don’t need to be a trained musician to make jazz part of your program and you don’t have to take time away from skill building in other areas. Children learn literacy, math, music, small and large motor skills, visual arts, and social studies while they are having fun with jazz—and jazz is a developmentally appropriate way to infuse your classroom with the joy of music!

Children love to hear and tell stories. Children tell their own stories as they pretend-play by themselves. When they play together, they create collaborative stories. When you tell or read stories to young children, you get their immediate attention. As the stories unfold, children become invested in the characters and plots. Stories are their gateway to learning. Skills are acquired almost effortlessly.

Stories allow children to focus and enter into learning experiences. For example, children can learn to sing the blues almost instantly within the context of pretending they are characters who are sad. They “become” the character. It makes sense to them to sing the blues because the blues reflect what the characters are feeling. In a like manner, children can learn to sing a scale as they pretend to be characters that are “climbing” stairs in their story. Because the stairs are going up, up, up, it is easy and natural for the pitch of their voices to go up, up, up, too.

Did you know that incorporating jazz and storytelling into your classroom can help build a foundation of many necessary skills? Jazz and storytelling:

Build Music Skills

Vocalization

Pitch

Rhythm

Listening skills

Recognizing patterns

Singing together

Understanding that written notes represent sounds and rhythms

Build Literacy Skills

Telling a story sequentially

Listening skills

Phonemic awareness

Rhyming

Tapping out syllables

Understanding characterization

Understanding stories and adding to stories told by others

Understanding and following oral directions

Listening respectfully without interrupting others

Speaking audibly

Speaking to dramatize an experience

Taking turns speaking

Understanding that written notes represent sounds and rhythms

Build Math Skills

Echoing patterns

Rhythms

Fractions: whole, half, quarter and eighth notes

Build Socio-Emotional Skills

Acquiring language for building empathy

Sharing and identifying feelings, emotions and experiences

Connecting to other people

Listening to each other

Solving problems together

Build Small and Large Motor Skills

Dancing, body movement

Fast and slow

Loud and soft

Hand movements

Jazz is playing with music within a structure. Storytelling is playing with words and ideas within a structure. If you can incorporates some simple jazz basics, such as scat singing (a jazz language used by singers when trying to make their voices sound like instruments), and basic rhythmic patterns and movements, and join them to storytelling, the result can be a powerful teaching tool for young children. You do not take away time from building academic skills when you bring jazz and storytelling into the classroom. Quite the opposite, you help children learn in a most enjoyable and accessible way.

The content of this article is excerpted from Jazzy Fairy Tales, a resource guide and CD designed to bring jazz music into the classroom. The activities provided may be used to supplement an existing program or to provide a ready-made, easy-to-use, all-encompassing music curriculum. The Appendix includes music theory terms, jazz terminology, standard blues form, and notation (melody with chords) for most of the themes and songs.